


your princess is in another castle

by estuary



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Recreational Drug Use, past alcohol abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-28
Updated: 2012-12-28
Packaged: 2017-11-22 17:37:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/612449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/estuary/pseuds/estuary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dream-pot is only a fraction as bad as real life alcohol, right? </p><p>Roxy and Meenah bond. A little.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your princess is in another castle

**Author's Note:**

  * For [adulescentiaMaia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/adulescentiaMaia/gifts).



> Happy Ladystuck, and Happy New Year!
> 
> In response to the prompt: _Precious babies who like getting high in each others laps. Emphasis on how young they feel._
> 
> This story went through a lot of changes, which I suppose is the downside to writing in a changing canon. With a sober Roxy introduced, this idea sort of took root and refused to let go.

Sobriety is probably the most important of your living achievements, and you didn't even do that for yourself. You had sobriety thrust upon you the way you've seen tons of heroes have greatness thrust upon them instead. 

It's at least up there with the hardcore speed-run you once did of _Mother 3_ and about on par with keeping yourself alive for fifteen years, the problem being that the latter probably wouldn't have been possible if you'd been committed to your sobriety then. 

It's something that needed to happen. 

Being sober sure does have its drawbacks on occasion. You cannot relax with your newly established collection of fanfiction and a drink to warm you over at night, or the arbitrary time period you and Janey have started designation as 'night,' or whatever you're going to call it, because in the end you are martini-less and thankful that you aren't just solving your problems with another problem. 

Generally your problems are alleviated – or should be – by the sheer blissful gloria-on-high bliss that happens to be you, not being alone, hanging out with your friends and playing the game that finally brought you all together. 

Except what's happening more often than not lately is that bringing you together seems like the cruelest thing the game has ever done. 

How you handle the dramambombing of Friendship Fort varies on a day to day basis. Playing peacemaker is your default – it's not hard, when you want everyone to be happy, to just smush the pieces of your fearsome foursome together and attempt to make them glue back together; it's less easy not to get hurt when the gesture fails. 

Sometimes you just drift off really far and _drift off;_ that is, you find yourself dozing and hoping you don't fall away into some pit of skeletal monsters. 

And hoping that instead of just hearing the anguished wails of some dying, albeit strangely precious, terror monsters, you might instead stumble into some far-off castle like you are plumbing the depths of sleep-space for her ethereal beauty and chance waywardly upon your Mom. 

Not-Mom. 

Whatever. 

You don't find your Not-Mom so often that you are starting to doubt her dreamy-existence. If you meet her, maybe it's going to have to be under more realistic circumstances. And the realism would probably turn out to be something terrible, too - like, what if your Not-Mom was really just one of the squid-monsters all along?

You don't find your Not-Mom, but you find the teenage seabitch in an atrium, all dragon-curled around a pile of completely useless knickknacks and worthless junk, legs propped up on an ottoman of boonbucks. She is supine and lazy and you remember being wasted well enough to look at her and figure maybe she's not really all there. When she sees you, she sits up and smiles with the whites of her dead eyes like some sick Ghost of Christmas Never to Come cue balls. 

“Hey, it's my old pincushion!” 

You have it on pretty good authority that Waterbitch Lite here has dedicated a considerable wealth of her afterlife to attempting to stab you – chatting is really the last thing you had in mind, and chatting with her when she's still hellbent on sticking a fork in you is even less appealing than that. 

“Yeeeeeeeah," you say, stretching out the disdain as long as you can manage. I think I'm gonna go wake up and listen to the very secret diaries of my social circle made public now.” You turn to go, and the path is gone.

Dream physics are literally the shittiest fucking physics because they don't even deal in dimensional anomalies, like traveling between planes or matter transport. Dream physics means the platform you just waltzed in on disappears behind you just when you're thinking of leaving this boss fight waiting to happen, and the stairs on the other side of this treasure room are suddenly blocked off, on account of they just crumbled to purple sand. 

The ghost says, “That shit happens a lot 'round here. Sit down, sea cucumber.” 

And you figure she probably isn't about to remember your name, and you're not really interested in hers, so the introductions you flip each other off with are about as pointless as 90% of the crazy eBay warehouse she's sitting on. 

“For two people what oughta be absolutely destroying one another – that's me destroyin' you, reely – we seem to be in the same pike-le when it comes to being surrounded by useless meatheads who can't get off their fat sacks long enough to contribute anyfin.”

The platform seems steep at claustrophobic. You inch a little closer to the hoard and sit down on some stolen goods. 

Seeing as the compulsive kleptomaniac empress with her throne of pilfered money is sitting on a shoplifter's wet dream; you're not really surprised when she whips out a parcel of unidentified green herbs from her tacky-as-shit shell purse. 

“Megido just left it in a chest. Clam you believe it? Serket'd flip her fuckin' lid,” Meenah says, although the thought sets her back for just a negligible starblink of a microsecond before she cracks into Megido's stash and does a drug thing the way you imagine someone would describe you doing a cocktail shaker thing. “But you'll feel betta, girl.” 

The drug-thing is impressive for a while, Meenah with a sharp little pocket knife preparing a joint on top of a boonbuck, until she utters _fuck_ beneath her breath and it's not so cool, more like young Roxy with a cocktail shaker than anything else after all. 

"How 'bout your shut your trap?" You must have have giggled. Meenah finishes rolling and buries the pocket knife to the hilt in the floor beside her.

Dream-pot is only about a fraction as bad as real-life alcohol, you have to figure, even if your bffsie wouldn't approve of your relationship with either. You let her lean really close and blow smoke into your mouth and nostrils the way you're pretty sure you saw in a picture once, and maybe she saw the same picture. 

Booze tastes better. It makes you feel better, in general, than this dizzy-swimming miasma of sensation, helium-brained, airheaded. You have some very dedicated science facts in the back of your brain about how it's very unlikely pot will affect you at all on your first try. 

Anything can happen in your psychadelic bad trip of a dream land, you guess. 

Even as a ghost - the ghost of a kid and not some empress, just a coward sort of like you - greygills is strong and fast, and you don't put up much of a fight when, trident-less, she reaches for you. Meenah gets you well and good into her lap before she lets you lie down dizzy on your back across her knees, looking up at her. Looking up. 

"You're just a kid, ain'tcha?" she murmurs, and she lets you smoke for yourself just this once. One of her braids wraps into a thin coil around your wrist and you turn your arm again and again until it's completely wrapped in hair - the better to drag her off in the event you really have to.

You don't feel the same wave of nauseated fear-anger, the gross hungover sensation of crippling dread and absolute loathing that colors every waking moment of thought you have to dedicate to Sea Hitler, who is the reason you have to be searching for your mom in a maze of crypts and questless tombs with people who seem to be looking for an excuse not to get along. 

In the end, you just kind-of-sort-of hate this one. You kind-of-sort-of hate her feeding smoke down your throat and you kind-of-sort-of-hate that the last time she does it she does it by kissing you, biting you while you are coughing. 

In a way it's just like those stories you use to hate for failing to be remotely metatextual: They pick on you because they like you; hurting is the way they show affection. Meenah doesn't like you, and you don't like he; she's half the reason you can't find your dead Not-Mom. But she looks like a kid who's going to pull your pigtails the next time you're on a jungle gym. 

A jungle gym would be rad. 

She makes a really shitty, uncontrollably horrible pun you don't even think makes sense, and your words stick to your tongue like sugar syrup for you to spit out, “You're just fishing for them now.” 

Waterbitch the Second – the First, fucking time lines, whatever - laughs in a way that makes her shark mouth full of fangs start gnashing together like tines of metal chasing you halfway across the kingdom. 

“You're okay,” she barks. “I'll still poke enough holes in you to make you a net.” Meenah pats your cheek violently. Like, you think she means to slap you but she's lazy and it just ends up this incredibly rough handling while she laughs again. 

“You look like a Chain-Chomp.” 

“The shell's that?” Meenah pulls your hair hard. Really hard. Hard. You're still on her lap, not a playground. “Speak some sense.” 

“It's a...” You pause with your hands raised halfway, mid-gesture. How are you supposed to explain the hours (the thousand years?) _Paper Mario_ drip-dried out of your life “It's a human thing,” you say finally. “Just from when I was a kid.” 

You bite her this time instead. You hate her enough to like this, to like it even more when she shoves you off her lap and into a pile of her hoarded treasure. 

She'd be a Nibbles anyway. 

There's nothing less safe than piranha in an empty ocean, and you're always falling off of cliff edges into water where you don't belong.


End file.
